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ISLAMABAD — Eight months after Pakistan’s then-newly appointed prime minister suspended
counterterrorist operations against Taliban militants and sought negotiations to end their
6-year-old insurgency, the country has discovered that the militants exploited that time to reverse
major losses they had suffered over the years at the hands of the 150,000 Pakistani soldiers
arrayed against them.

The Taliban’s regeneration can be seen in a wave of murderous attacks on military and police
targets in three major cities, and in the deterioration of security in Peshawar, the capital of the
northern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, which borders the country’s restive tribal areas.

Peshawar had become relatively secure against attacks by the Pakistani Taliban, known as the TTP
after its Urdu-language acronym. Now, however, the city’s ring road is “completely under the
control of the militants after dark,” said Sen. Haji Adeel of the Awami National Party, an
ethnic-Pashtun nationalist party based in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

Among the reasons for the TTP’s re-infiltration of the city is the military’s withdrawal, since
June, from the strategic Tirah Valley of the Khyber tribal agency, which is next to Peshawar.

The military’s taking of Tirah in a three-month assault last year was hailed as a major
strategic victory because, for the first time, the army had closed off a key conduit between the
northern and southern tribal areas that the Pakistani Taliban had used to withdraw or add forces in
response to government counterterrorism operations.

The seizure of the territory also severed the line of communications between the TTP’s chief at
the time, Hakimullah Mehsud, and the 70-plus factions that make up the terrorist group.

The Taliban resurgence also was evidenced by back-to-back terrorist attacks in January on
military and police personnel in Rawalpindi, the city adjacent to Islamabad that houses army
headquarters. Those attacks demonstrated that the TTP had deployed terrorist squads at the army’s
front door, evading the military’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate in the
process.

More alarming, the Taliban also has launched a campaign in the port city of Karachi, a
metropolis of more than 18 million people that is the backbone of Pakistan’s weak economy.